Jo

“It’s kid’s night,” Jo tells Mom. “Something new they’re trying out at AA.”

Mom looks at Jo. I know she’s not buying it, but she lets me go. As we’re climbing into Beatrice, Jo pauses and says, “Hold on. I forgot the gun.”

I flinch. “What?”

She fumbles in the garage through her mess of tools and scrap wood and car parts and returns with my paintball marker.

“Why do we need that?”

Jo slides the gun behind her seat and revs the engine. “It’s part of my twelve-step program.” She shifts into reverse. “Step one: Step on it.”

I don’t ask. This is Jo.

She cranks up the radio to earsplitting volume, which I love. We’re tuned to 105 FM, our favorite station. Hot LED. The hard-core rock fissures your bones and fries your brain.

We’re deaf as rocks when we pull into the parking lot at Tony’s Liquors.

I narrow my eyes at Jo.

“Wait here,” she says, flinging open the door and launching out. I watch her open the grated door and disappear inside. A slow burn ignites in my core and spreads up to my chest, through my head, to my ringing ears. She promised. Promised.

A minute later she hops back in, toting two twelve-packs and another paper bag, all of which she shoves behind us in the cab.

I’m seething. I’m fuming. The fire from my eyes scabs the plastic on the dash. She says, “Anyone ever tell you you look exactly like your mother when she’s pissed off?”

I fold my arms and twist my torso to glare out the window.

Jo sighs. “And you’re just about as trusting.”

We spew gravel as we peal out. Usually, we holler over the pounding bass to talk, joke around, hurl insults, but we’re not speaking this trip. At least I’m not. Jo heads out to the country.

We drive for about twenty minutes, beyond the city, the last housing development, and turn onto a dirt road. A NO TRESPASSING sign whizzes by. Jo veers Beatrice directly into the woods and rumbles through the trees. I hang on to my seat as my teeth chatter. We crunch to a stop at the end of the road, and the music cuts out. “Grab the flashlight,” Jo says.

I sit for a minute, brooding. She promised. Promised.

“Nick! What’d I say?” she yells from outside. Her door slams.

It’s pitch black. I grab the Coleman lantern, the only flashlight I can find. I don’t see Jo, and panic.

“Over here,” she calls.

My heart’s racing. What are we doing? It’s eerie. There’s no one here. Animal eyes are watching us, though. I can sense them observing our every move, tasting dinner.

“This is a good place. Set her up.”

What does she mean? “Set what up?”

Jo rips into a twelve-pack and lifts out two beers, one in each hand. With her teeth she pops the tops. Tipping the cans, she drains them onto the ground. The beer fizzes and foams at her feet. She sets the emptied cans on an old log behind her and stacks. Four in a row. Three between the four. Two on top. One at the peak. “Give us some light,” she orders.

There’s a thick crescent moon, but it’s gauzy, like a ghost story. I flick on the lantern and flash the head beams over Jo’s handiwork. She’s building another pyramid on a rock formation to her right, and I notice in the light there are dozens of cans littered around the area. Maybe hundreds. So this is where she comes.

“Nick, what the hell are you doing? Pick a spot and hang the lamp. Let’s get this show on the road.”

If I poke the nearest limb through the handle, the beams shine in the wrong direction, toward Beatrice, where Jo’s headed. Where’s she going? I decide to wedge the lantern between two branches of a skinny pine tree. It illuminates all the cans, like a helicopter strobe spotlighting debris from a plane crash.

Jo guns the engine and I freak. Is she leaving me here? I sprint back, tripping over a root and taking a header. My glasses fly.

I grope around.

“For my next kid, I’m requesting the coordination gene,” Jo says. I get up and brush the pine needles off my hands and knees. My glasses dangle from Jo’s pinkie finger, and I snatch them off. “What the hell are we doing out here?” I snarl.

She slugs me on the arm. Hoisting herself onto the truck bed, she extends a hand to me. While I was sucking dirt, she’d backed Beatrice around.

I don’t need help. She’s got two of our plastic lawn chairs in the truck bed, scootched up close to the cab. As she plops in the left one, she motions me down to the right. I sit. She hands me the marker. Goggles land in my lap. “Still remember how to use this baby?”

“Duh,” I say. Granted, the marker didn’t get a lot of use. When Jo bought it for me last Christmas, Mom had a cow. She told Jo to return it. Jo refused. “You know I hate guns,” Mom said. “We’ll be careful,” Jo countered. Mom actually shouted, “No! Take it back. I forbid guns in this house.”

Jo said, “I’m not taking it back.”

Mom stormed to her room.

Jo could take it back if they were going to fight about it. I didn’t care. Except . . . I did. I really wanted a paintgun. Matt had a semiauto Spyder. He played paintball with his dad almost every weekend.

The only time I ever got to shoot was when Jo and I snuck out. We’d tell Mom we were going to a hockey game or something and drive to the firing range. Mostly we’d target shoot. This one time we went to a real field where a tournament was being held — guys in camo flanking bunkers and snapshooting. It looked like a blast. Jo and I were dying to get out there.

We hadn’t gone to shoot paintball in a while. Not since Jo joined AA.

“What am I shooting at?” I ask, sighting through my goggles an eternal forest of black.

“Duh,” Jo mocks. “The cans?”

Our voices muffle in our masks. Is this what she does? All those nights she’s supposed to be at AA? I lower the gun. “You promised,” I say accusingly.

Jo tilts her head. She looks like an alien, like Darth Vader. “I promised I’d quit drinking. I didn’t say how.” She lifts the barrel in front of my face. “Shoot.”

“You told Mom —”

“I told her I’d join AA. I did. Are you going to shoot or not?”

I lodge the CO₂ tank against my armpit. She’s loaded yellow balls. I sight a can and squeeze the trigger, then realize I forgot to cock for the first shot. Jo doesn’t say what I’m thinking: Shit for brains.

Finally I get off a shot and miss. “We’re too far away,” I say.

Jo takes the marker. She fires. Splat. The top can on the log pyramid sails backward and bounces off a tree. Jo licks her finger and air marks a score. She hands me the gun.

“Did you ever go?” I ask. Because I’m curious. To what depths will Jo sink to deceive Mom? Or me.

“To an AA meeting? Yeah, I went. Once.” Jo pushes her goggle mask up onto her head. “It brought back memories. Bad ones.”

I raise the marker. “Like what?” I take aim.

“Like Alateen, which I did a few times when I was growing up. It didn’t take. I hate that group shit. The whole touchy-feely thing reminds me of church. Let’s hug and pray and ask forgiveness from Our Heavenly Father as we poor wretched souls cling to each other in this hour of need, this time of desperation.” Jo wiggles her hands in the air. “Hallelujah.”

I crack a smile. But I’m listening.

“Where was my Heavenly Father when my heavenly mother was puking up all over the bathroom floor? When I’d get up in the middle of the night and slip in that shit? I’d get it all over me and have to clean it up. Where was He — where was anyone — on the nights my folks even bothered to come home at all? Where was Alateen then?” Jo levels the barrel. “Are you going to shoot or what?”

I squeeze the trigger. Whoosh. The paintball zings into the trees. I wasn’t really aiming.

Jo yanks her goggles back down over her face. “Come on, sissy miss,” she muffles. “You can do it. If I can do it, you can do it.”

I squint and line up the label on the Budweiser can directly in the center of the gun barrel. Pop. Splat. A can pitches to the left. Yeah! I punch the air.

“We’re even,” Jo says in a fuzzy voice. She reaches for the marker, but I don’t relinquish it.

“What?”

I slide up my goggles. So does she. I ask her point-blank. “Are you still drinking?”

Jo holds my eyes. Her head starts to wobble and bob. “You know, Nick,” she goes. Broken neck. “I got my own twelve-step program. Steps number one through eleven” — her eyeballs bounce around — “do what you need to do to get it done. Step number twelve: Never drink alone.” She gets up and hurdles the side of the truck, crunching to a landing. From the cab, she retrieves the paper bag. She slings it over the side and, stepping on the rusted wheel hub, levers herself up and over. From the bag, she removes a plastic bottle and unscrews the lid. The contents hiss. She hands it to me and opens one for herself.

“Cheers queers.” She chucks her bottle on mine.

It’s Coke. We slug it back in unison. She hasn’t answered my question, but I don’t press. She promised, and I have to trust she’s as good as her word. This is Jo. I want to believe.

Here’s what I believe today: Until you’re old enough to see your parents for who they really are, you can’t trust a word they tell you. I don’t ask, and Jo doesn’t tell. If she’s not drinking again after everything that’s happened, I can’t imagine what would make her start.